Small One
by Swifthound
Summary: For everything that lives, something must die..


She shuffles painfully through the grass, her belly heavy and stirring. All is dark and quiet save for the wind in the grass. She lifts her blunt, hard snout to the wind, questing for danger. At any other time, she would be able to see off any creature that dared to challenge her, but not now, no more. This is the time she is vulnerable, and those who would kill her, to gorge themselves on her flesh, know it. Many of her kind die this way, pulled down and slaughtered before they can get to the cave. Her weapon, which has served her well throughout her long life, hangs from a limp hand. It is useless to her now, but still she keeps it with her. It is too much a part of her to be lost.

She can hear them now, the helldogs, their death cries echoing in the night behind her. They know. She moves faster, faster, her belly aching more and more as she moves. Her pain, her fear, all merging, blurring together in a red haze, blotting each other out, until she knows and remembers only one thing. She must get to the cave. If she forgets all else, she must remember this.

The helldogs' cries hardly register now, but whether they have lost her scent or whether she has simply become near-deaf with the pain in her belly she does not know. _Small-one_ stirs within her. The time is near. She struggles on, heedless, uncaring. Even if they find her, catch her, tear her to pieces and rip _small-one_ from her belly, she will keep moving. She must reach the ancients' cave. _Small-one's_ feet must first touch rock and earth there; _small-one's_ hand must first touch bone of those who have passed through. Only then will be revealed to _small-one_ the secrets of their kind, the secret weapons, the secret cave. Like her mother before her, she must do this for _small-one_... or _small-one_ will never know the age-old song of the earth and the weight of the weapon in her hand...

The evil grass winds around her feet, trips her, and she hisses in anguish. She does not like the grass. She wishes all her world could be bare soil and high rock. She would never have left the rocky niches she once called home but for this inexorable pull, driving her to the place of the ancients. Time is being lost, she must hurry...

The scent. She knows that scent. Blinking painfully she edges forward a little more... yes. Yes, the scent of the ancients. The hated grass grows thinner here; even it shrinks back in fear of their might. Perhaps just beyond that rock...

And there it is, stretching away like the dark mouth of some great ancestor, the place she has never seen save in dreams, but that exudes such a message of warmth and love, for her, just for her, that she feels as if she might burst with a joy so deep it feels like sorrow. With a glad, painful cry that is almost a sob she tears her way down the sheer rocky face, feeling with delight once more rough stone beneath her feet. She collapses at the bottom. All around her are bones, remnants of a previous life long-discarded by their occupants. All of a sudden they are there, surrounding her, welcoming her. She can see their ghostly forms in the moonlight, hear them whisper. _Daughter, mother, sister, child._ She feels like weeping. With a tired, happy sigh she crawls onto a heap of bones and into their embrace, rolling skyward onto her back, her belly exposed to the stars.

Now, now the pain shows her that it had only been toying with her before. Her belly seems to split open like a ripe fruit, something warm and wet drenches her legs, and she writhes and shivers and cries out with the agony of a thousand generations before. They press closer to her, breathing silent encouragement and soothing words. She can hardly hear at all, feel at all, know anything beyond this pain, but she draws upon the strength that they offer her.

At last she feels _small-one_ slide from her and her head falls back as she gasps desperately, rolling back onto her side. She breathes deep, hears nothing but the roar of blood in her ears. She opens her eyes a crack. _Small-one_ is here, her small snout touching hers, her wide eyes blinking, the tiny body all soaked with red. She stretches out her tongue and licks _small-one_, and _small-one_ licks back with her small tongue and nuzzles closer, and she clutches _small-one_ to her chest, fiercely, possessively, even as she feels herself slipping away.

And then she is in the air, looking down at herself holding the small brown body to her. _Small-one_ is asleep, and she is gone. She feels indescribably light, and peace suffuses her as the others surround her. She has fulfilled her duty to _small-one_. Now _small-one_ will know... and _small-one_ will go away to her own rocky niches, and someday _small-one_ will return, and they will be together again.

They hover, swirling around _small-one_ and she who is gone, and then they fade away into the rocks and the earth and the pile of bones.

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In the morning a baby Cubone awakes to find her mother grown cold and dry and still. She whimpers, pushing her snout against that which she knows gave her warmth, and love, but there is nothing. Nothing there anymore.

She opens her mouth in an infant's wail of distress and anguish and loss. Her mother is gone, and that is all that she knows.

She hears a whisper, as if on the breeze, and her ears prick sharply. The moan of the wind through the rocks and the bones seems to speak to her, and she slowly gets up, turning her small brown head this way and that.

Following some age-old wisdom she noses around in some cracks in the rock and finds small brown crawling things which she chews up and swallows with relish. She finds a pocket of water, fed by some secret spring deep underground, and drinks deeply. She scales the nearby rocks with practiced ease, small brown creature trying out her new legs as the Pidgey flocks chatter overhead, and she looks up as she scampers atop the rough surface, and wonders at their wings.

When she returns, at length, to the Marowak's body, she finds that her mother has fallen to dust, and all that is left are her bones, dry and grey... and hard. Again, she hears the soft call that pulls her like a Magneton to iron, feels the pulse in her body, calling up and awaking the knowledge of her kind. With all due solemnity, she moves to her mother's hip, and breaks away the femur. It comes off easily at her touch.

She curls up beside the skeleton, touches her nose to its nose once more, then pushes her small head below the jawbone, up into the skull. The spine joint snaps, and she breaks away. She feels her mother's skull enclose her head, protecting her; she looks through her mother's sightless eyes. Her mother is gone forever... and someday, she knows, she will return to this place and die her mother's death. These are her helmet and her weapon – her eternal sorrow, her memento mori.

As she stands on the rocks that border the place of death and new life, looking down on she who is gone and all who have gone before, she lifts up her voice once more in a sorrowing cry that echoes from the depths of the bone-helmet like a funeral dirge, a eulogy. And as she moves away from the graveyard of her ancestors and into the very large and very unfamiliar world beyond, she hears their replies drift back to her on the sighing wind.

_Be brave, child, daughter, sister. Mother. Small-one..._

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Author's Note: Just a little scribble I did that I've been wanting to do since I read Cubone and Marowak's Pokédex descriptions. And because I want to write, but am a little stuck on Dream Team at present, and busy with college to boot :P


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